Overcoming Barriers to Innovation in Traditional Industries

Traditional industries worldwide are facing a decline, which can be attributed to various factors. While innovation is the heartbeat of any successful business, organizations working in these traditional industries like agriculture and manufacturing for example, often find it harder than others to break through the glass ceiling and innovate and grow.

However, innovation is crucial for adaptability, growth, and standing out from the competition. Understanding the most common barriers, as well as how to overcome them, is a catalyst for sustained success.

Let’s examine some of the barriers that more traditional organizations frequently encounter when it comes to innovation:

1. Bureaucracy

One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of innovation is bureaucracy. This can discourage employees from presenting their ideas, not least because of a lack of an error culture. Bottom-up innovation and empowering people across the organization can instantly take innovation efforts to the next level. Some of the best ways to ensure this are; 

• Actively welcoming ideas from employees at all levels of the organization.

• Celebrating their successes, even if they don’t unlock a break-through innovation or idea.

• Accepting failure as a necessary step on the path to success.

• Being open to collaborations, including collaborations with customers and other organizations.

2. No time for innovation

Most global executives think there are not enough skilled workers in their industry. However, skill might be there but going unnoticed. It is difficult for employees to come up with new ideas if they aren't given a chance. Time is truly the most valuable resource at your disposal, which is why organizations in traditional industries must consciously make time for innovation.

Aside from presenting employees with the chance to innovate, it should leave them with clearer mindsets too.

Here’s how to ensure that employees do have enough time to work on their ideas:

• Allow employees to work on their innovations whilst ideas are fresh and embrace an innovation program that allows for idea submission around the clock, 

• Give employees the freedom to work on their ideas autonomously.

• Utilize time blocking methods, such as the 70-20-10 rule

• Put frameworks in place to make innovation tasks more efficient. 

• Run impromptu brainstorming and experimentation sessions.

3. Lack of direction

Idea generation is one thing, but one of the biggest challenges to successful idea generation comes from ensuring that innovations are contextual, viable, and desirable. Therefore, establishing a sense of direction is vital for selecting the best employee-driven innovations and driving the company to success. Once employees know what the organization wants to achieve with its innovation strategy, the chances of success will soar. The key steps are;

• Have a clear mission statement for your innovation strategy.

• Create a sense of ownership and engagement for intrapreneurs.

• Focus on generating customer-centric ideas.

• Use an appropriate framework to guide innovation from idea to validation and finally to implementation. A helpful tool here, is having the right innovation management program. 

4. Lack of capital

A lack of funding, or at least a perceived lack of capital, is often the barrier to achieving business goals. Radical innovation, for example, due to is transformative nature is known to be capital intensive.

However, many companies working in traditional industries can’t afford to invest huge amounts of capital (and time) into innovations, which are not guaranteed to succeed.

Therefore, it is vital to build an innovation strategy that is efficient and effective. Organizations can do this by;

• Investing in frameworks that streamline innovations.

• Consider using appropriate time- and resource-sparing methodologies when evaluating ideas (e.g. virtualizations, prototypes, MVPs)

• Looking for opportunities for incremental innovation.

• Getting products out to market and reinvesting revenue into future innovation.

• Killing failed ideas quickly to minimize unnecessary resource expenditure.

In the ever-evolving economic landscape, traditional industries must swiftly respond to shifting dynamics. At the same time, it is crucial to dismantle the barriers hindering innovation within these sectors. Depending on the willingness of organizations to actively overcome these barriers, the potential to grow and build an innovation strategy that lasts, ultimately varies.